Social and economic development of underdeveloped & developing countries bringing about an equitable growth eradicating the poverty, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy and providing the poor better livelihood options...

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The strategy for inclusive growth should not be just a
conventional strategy for growth to which some elements aimed at inclusion have
been added. On the contrary, it should be a strategy which aims at achieving a
particular type of growth process which will meet the objectives of
inclusiveness and sustainability

It is now
well established that economic growth and prosperity in India has generally
bypassed a large number of marginalised and disadvantaged people such as the
dalits, adivasis, nomadic tribes, women, slum and pavement dwellers, the
disabled and old people, and people living in remote areas, who have remained
voiceless and ignored. The crux of such a hopeless situation for them lies in
their inability to access and retain their rightful entitlements to public goods
and services due to institutionalised structures and processes of exploitation.

Excluded groups are disadvantaged in many ways. They are victims
of prejudice, are ignored, and are often treated as less than human beings by
the village elite and government officials. They live in remote hamlets and are
thus geographically separated from the centres of delivery. Their hamlets are
scattered so that the cost of contacting them is higher. Finally it is their
extreme poverty that prevents them from taking advantage of government schemes,
whether it is free schooling (children are withdrawn because their labour is
needed at home or for work), or immunization (they migrate along with their
parents and therefore not present in the village when the health worker visits).

The 12th Five Year Plan, as expected, gives a high priority on
paper to inclusive growth and reduction of inequality, but the past trends have
not been very encouraging, as inequality seems to be going up, and the much
needed policies and programmes for the disadvantaged are still to be put on
ground.

Dalits – Various field studies
show that untouchability is still practiced in many forms throughout the
country. Dalit women suffer the triple burden of caste, class and gender, and
continue to routinely suffer sexual abuse and rape by upper-caste landlords in
many parts of the country. Dalit women are also raped as a form of retaliation.
No one practices untouchability when it comes to sex.

In towns and cities, however, there is far greater anonymity and
occupational mobility, which enables blurring of caste identities. It has been
documented that urban migration by dalits is often impelled not only by
economic compulsions, but also by the desire to escape the social degradation
of untouchability.

In rural India a majority of them, being poor and assetless, are
mainly engaged as agricultural labourers. In addition, they continue to derive
livelihood from occupations like scavenging, flaying, tanning etc. To break the
caste-based occupational stereotyping, special efforts need to be made to
encourage them to make the best use of the educational concessions and
programmes being extended by the Government. Also, there is a need to
vocationalise the education right at the middle-school level to promote occupational
mobility for these groups.

Further, their settlements in many areas
continue to be in the outskirts and in seclusion from the mainstream settlement
manifesting social segregation. Also, their dwellings are still devoid of basic
minimum amenities like safe drinking water, health and sanitation, roads etc.
Therefore, special packages of basic minimum services viz. safe drinking water;
nutrition supplementation; primary health care; primary education and
employment-cum-income-generation activities needs to be designed/developed to
cater to the dalit Clusters/Bastis.

Scheduled Tribes- From the viewpoint of policy, it is important to understand
that tribal communities are vulnerable not only because they are poor,
assetless and illiterate compared to the general population; often their
distinct vulnerability arises from their inability to negotiate and cope with
the consequences of their forced integration with the mainstream economy,
society, cultural and political system, from which they were historically
protected as the result of their relative isolation. Post-independence, the
requirements of planned development brought with them the spectre of dams,
mines, industries and roads on tribal lands. With these came the concomitant
processes of displacement, both literal and metaphorical - as tribal
institutions and practices were forced into uneasy existence with or gave way
to market or formal state institutions (most significantly, in the legal
sphere), tribal peoples found themselves at a profound disadvantage with
respect to the influx of better-equipped outsiders into tribal areas. The
repercussions for the already fragile socio-economic livelihood base of the tribal
were devastating - ranging from loss of livelihoods, land alienation on a vast
scale, to hereditary bondage.

As tribal people in India perilously, sometimes hopelessly,
grapple with these tragic consequences, the small clutch of bureaucratic
programmes have done little to assist the precipitous pauperisation, exploitation
and disintegration of tribal communities. Tribal people respond occasionally
with anger and assertion, but often also in anomie and despair, and suffer
silently.

We recommend that state governments launch a drive to prevent
land alienation and to restore lands lost by the adivasis in the last two
decades. Secondly, Constitutional guarantees to them regarding protection of
religious and cultural rights must be fully honoured. These are also reflected
in the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996 (PESA)
for Schedule V areas, but unfortunately not fully observed in the field. Let us
hope that the new Land Acquisition Bill will ensure that their lands are not
taken away without their informed consent and full rehabilitation. Lastly, community
rights enshrined in the Forest Rights Act are still to be given to them on
ground.

The Ministry of Tribal Development and the Ministry of Social
Justice and Empowerment should play a more activist role in addressing these
issues by pursuing them with the concerned Ministries.

Women – The decline in the
juvenile sex ratio over the last decade, visible in the data from Census 2011,
is an indication that the Constitutional assurance of freedom and equality for
women is still far from being fulfilled. While the literacy rate has gone up, 273
million people in India were still illiterate in 2011, of which two-thirds
were women. Despite women’s vital contribution to agriculture and allied
sectors in India, they lack control over productive assets (land, livestock,
fisheries, technologies, credit, finance, markets etc.), face bias due to
socio-cultural practices, experience gender differentials in agricultural wages
and decisions concerning crop management and marketing.

Even though the legal framework on succession has been amended
in favour of women in 2005 with the deletion of the gender discriminatory
clause on inheritance of agricultural land, neither the Ministry of Women &
Child Development nor the Department of Land Resources have taken any interest
in pursuing the implementation of this law. The net result is that daughters
still do not inherit agricultural land in actual practice. These two Ministries
should launch a campaign to correct revenue records and ensure that women’s
land ownership rights are properly recognized and recorded by the States.

Asset redistribution is superior to income redistribution. It
provides a basis for overcoming distortions in the functioning of markets and
for restructuring gender relations in the fields of property rights, access to
technology, healthcare and governance. Asset ownership and control rights are
preferable to numerous policy alternatives for women’s empowerment. These are
likely to bring in changes in public opinion about gender roles and social cultural
norms of deep-seated social inequalities of women such as the household
division of labour, restraints on women’s speaking in public, constraints on
women’s mobility and pervasive gender-based violence within the home and
outside.

Government schemes unfortunately ignore
intra-household inequities. Currently food security schemes fail to address the
needs of single women within the existing framework. Ration cards are usually
in the name of the man, and in the case of separation the wife does not have access
to a card. The new Food Security Bill should mandate the provision of ration
card only in the name of women, who should be declared as head of the
household.

Some general issues

Inclusiveness is not just about bringing those
below an official fixed poverty line to a level above it. It is also about a
growth process which is seen to be ‘fair’ by different socio-economic groups
that constitute our society. We therefore recommend an effort at least once
every two years to not just estimate these groups, but to conduct a full
listing. It is remarkable that although persons deemed to be ‘below poverty
line’ in rural areas have been surveyed and listed, no such survey has been
undertaken for urban areas since Independence, although around a third of the country’s
poor live in cities. Government should therefore identify and list the most
poor and vulnerable segments of urban populations by identifying them along
objective and verifiable criteria of vulnerability and denial of rights. These
are:

a) place of residence and access to public services:
(shelterless, unauthorized slum dwellers, authorized slum dwellers and
residents of resettlement colonies);

b) social vulnerability: children without protection and child
headed households, single women and single women headed households, disabled
people, old people without care givers, people in destitution;

The government should ensure within one year pensions for all
aged people above the age of 65 years who in rural areas are landless,
artisans, and small or marginal farmers, and all SC and ST aged persons; and in
urban areas all aged persons who are residents of slums or homeless, and all
unorganised workers.

Many government programmes are plagued by corruption, leakages,
errors in selection, delays, poor allocations and little accountability. They
also tend to discriminate against and exclude those who most need them, by
social barriers of gender, age, caste, ethnicity, faith and disability; and
State hostility to urban poor migrants, street and slum residents, and
unorganised workers.

Overcoming corruption, theft, leakages, inefficiencies, and
constraints of costs, are imperative, but still not sufficient, in a highly
unequal society like ours, to overcome the barriers that powerless and expelled
dispossessed people face to access food and livelihoods with dignity. The
strategy for inclusive growth should not be just a conventional strategy for
growth to which some elements aimed at inclusion have been added. On the
contrary, it should be a strategy which aims at achieving a particular type
of growth process which will meet the objectives of inclusiveness and
sustainability. This strategy must be based on sound macroeconomic policies
which establish the macroeconomic preconditions for rapid growth and support
key drivers of this growth. It must also include sector-specific policies which
will ensure that the structure of growth that is generated, and the
institutional environment in which it occurs, achieves the objective of
inclusiveness in all its many dimensions. 

By : N C Saxena; The author is currently Member of the National
Advisory Council. He retired as Secretary, Planning Commission. He did his
Doctorate in Forestry from the Oxford University. He was awarded honorary Ph.D
from the University of East Anglia in 2006.